New York, NY —

The Department of Homeless Services is cracking down on homeless families lingering in city shelters for too long. A few hundred have been put into a program designed to structure their days and intensify any services available so they can find a permanent place to live and move out. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez reports:

REPORTER: Some homeless advocates call them boot camp shelters. The city calls them “ next step” shelters. So far about 260 families have begun the program.

HARRIS: My name is Mary Harris…I’m 57 years old

REPORTER: As the head of her 5 member household –Harris entered the Next Step program two months ago. For her it has meant regular van rides to see potential apartments, escorts to public assistance appointments, reminder notes slipped under her door, mandatory attendance at workshops on subjects such as how to manage credit and early morning wake up calls that Harris says annoyed people at first:

HARRIS: Oh they knocking on your door. That’s the security guards. The security guards were under heat as well. This is not your job don’t come knocking on my door like you the police. I’m not getting up. They were getting cursed out for like but now everybody just mellowed and eased out now everybody is like I’m in the Next Step, we’re proud.

REPORTER: Harris sees the extra monitoring as attention she had been lacking. She speaks to me inside a small office at the Jamaica Family Center, a Queens shelter where she's been for two years. Prior to that though she spent several years at shelters in Flatlands Brooklyn and elsewhere:

HARRIS: Like Flatlands, I was there for maybe two years, I never knew my social worker….I never knew the name of my housing specialist, they never came to me and said oh you gotta look for a place your under this program or your under that program file for section 8, nothing.

REPORTER:In total, Harris, her husband, adult brother, 26 year old daughter, and five year old grand daughter have been in shelter for more than 7 years. Hers is an extreme case, the average length of stay for a family in shelter is 9 months. While she puts some of the blame on the shelter system she admits her past schedule of going to bed at 3am and sleeping until 2 in the afternoon did not help matters much:

HARRIS: I’m the head of the household and I’m the one that was mainly had to be up to sign everything to do this to do that. And now he’s glad my husband because he used to be like you gotta go you the head of the house hold I’m not. But I would still slack a lot.

REPORTER: Harris’s family was an obvious choice for Next Step. But families who have been in shelter a shorter amount of time may also be moved into the program if they are not searching for apartments regularly or doing the legwork and the paperwork that goes along with finding a permanent place to live. But motivating people to search is only half the problem - a shortage of decent, safe and cheaper apartments is the other.

Ralph Nunez runs five shelters in the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan and says staff recently received a list of shelter residents who the city feels should be ready to move out on their own:

NUNEZ: If you can’t find then an apartment by the 20th of September get them ready to go to next step. How is that going to work. Housing is not that readily available.

REPORTER: In addition, some homeless families don't qualify for a housing voucher that helps pay the rent at private apartments. You must have an open child welfare case, be disabled or be employed at least part time. The average young single mother may not fall into any of these categories.

The city says it doesn't know yet how many families have been certified for the new housing voucher. But it says it does know Next Step is beginning to work. Robert Hess is the Commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services:

HESS: Of the kind of initial group ….., they’ve averaged over two years in shelter before they arrived in next step and they’ve been exiting the shelter system and moving to independence in less than a month or a month and a half, I think 32 days was the last number I saw and so we’re very encouraged by those early results.

REPORTER: According to the city, about a third of the families in Next Step have moved into their own permanent apartments. Before moving families into the program, Hess says conferences are held with them and they are given a plan to follow. If they comply they stay put. About 400 families are in that process right now. Hess does not believe Next Step is punitive and instead sees it as a way to get to the bottom of what a family needs and then provide it for them:

HESS: It’s better for the children. It’s better for the family that they not be in the shelter and frankly I have to tell you after speaking to thousands of staff and women and children in shelter, men in shelter after the last number of years, families don’t want to be living in our shelter system. They want to be living back in their community. They want to be living independently.

REPORTER: After more than seven years in shelter and some prodding from the city, Harris is ready to be on her own but she says the pressure to get out is getting intense. Three weeks after our initial interview her apartment search has gone nowhere. She spoke to me from her cell phone at the Queens family shelter:

HARRIS: The last place I went to looked worse than a shantytown. I told my worker that I was so insulted that she would bring me to that kind of place. I can't even exaggerate about it.

REPORTER: Harris says she's being pushed to take the apartment by her caseworker but she's refusing and will continue to search on her own. The city says Harris is free to choose an apartment that suits her. For WNYC, I'm Cindy Rodriguez